It’s about creating a lasting impression that will keep all your customers engaged with your products or services and coming back for more.
Imagine a locally-owned store operating in a small town—a simple, familiar place where the shopkeep knows your name and knows precisely how to help you find what you need.
That level of individual attention is something that might seem lost in modern business, especially on the chronically impersonal internet. But with the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, you can optimize your marketing to suit the unique needs of every customer, just like you might in a small independent business.
With a little help from your CRM platform, personalized marketing practices can be expanded to even the largest customer databases.
Which CRM Features Are Essential for Marketing?
Just about any modern CRM will offer a goldmine of data for your marketing team to review. A quality CRM lets you view the details of every interaction a customer has with your business, including detailed breakdowns of each purchase, inquiry, support ticket, and any other conversation they’ve had on your website or with your team.
The most effective CRMs for marketing tend to automate and simplify many essential tasks that allow you to build productive and long-lasting relationships with your customer base.
Before we dive into the best CRM solutions for marketing, here are a few features that your marketing team will absolutely need:
- Customer conversation histories: By having a chronological record of every interaction a prospect or customer has had with your company, you can deliver the most relevant marketing communication at the right time.
- Lead form integration: When a website visitor completes a form to receive a content offer, subscribe to your newsletter, sign up for a demo, or contact your sales team, their name and email address should populate in your CRM automatically.
- Customer filtering: Being able to segment your prospects and customers by factors such as geographic location, industry type, lifetime value, and date of last contact allows you to create highly specific marketing messages that are more likely to capture your buyers’ attention.
- Automated email nurturing: A well-equipped CRM should cut down on the labor your marketing team needs to invest into organizing email lists and sending follow-up emails, by automatically sending email communications based on where a prospect is in your sales process.
- Visibility into which marketing efforts are generating the most revenue: The ability to track leads from source to sale helps you understand which marketing efforts are paying off and which should be improved or cut loose. While it’s rare to find a CRM that can do this out of the box, it’s worth it to find a platform that offers an integration or add-on that can tell you the revenue impact of individual marketing campaigns.
Making all of this data quickly searchable and easy-to-digest gives your marketing team a full view of all the need-to-know details about your customer base. That information empowers you to make personalized recommendations, offer uniquely targeted promotions, and add genuine value in the one-on-one interactions you have with your customers.
The Eight Best CRMs for Marketing
No matter which CRM solution your business uses, you can probably find several add-ons designed to enhance the marketing features in your CRM. While this can be pretty handy, we’re going to focus on CRMs designed for marketing from the ground up.
That means that each CRM on this list includes a host of integrated features built directly into the software. These tools simplify your marketing efforts, allowing you to automate certain communications and track customer behavior in much less time.
Let’s take a look at eight of the top CRMs for marketing.
